What if Napoleon had taken Moscow, Franz Ferdinand had survived Sarajevo or the Brighton bomb had killed Margaret Thatcher? What Might Have Been: Imaginary History from Twelve Leading Historians divided reviewers along ideological lines, largely because of the claims made for "counterfactual history" by the book's editor, Andrew Roberts.

"Roberts explains in his introduction that he wants to do down the historical determinists, especially the Marxist kind," noted Nicholas Harman in the Spectator. In the Telegraph, Philip Ziegler was prompted to cry: "Look on these works, ye Determinists and Dialectical Materialists, and, if you do not actually despair, at least consider the possibility that you may not be entirely right."

"Skip the ponderous denunciation of 'Whig and Marxist history'," advised a more sanguine Roy Hattersley in the Observer. After all, he added with regard to Napoleon's retreat from Moscow: "It is not necessary to be a Marxist determinist to believe in the Russian winter." In the Sunday Times, Andrew Holgate thought that "the best contributions are the most circumspect ones" and deprecated "the temptation... for historians playing God to indulge in a bit of Old Testament-style retribution".

In contrast, Harman exposed a wholly different problem: "Historians, notoriously bound to recorded facts, are not often at ease with speculation, and several of the dozen, offered the chance to tell a fib, fail to tell a big enough one. Journalists, who habitually resent the truth when it spoils a good story, might have done the job better."

William Trevor's new collection of short stories, A Bit on the Side, was welcomed with a kind of hushed reverence. "A strain of compassionate stoicism runs through Trevor's writing," observed Joanna Kavenna in the Telegraph, "a rather Blakean sensibility, an acceptance of the realities of the world of 'experience' and the play of contraries. Trevor finds that it is not innocence that makes life interesting; it is the struggle to maintain dignity in the face of adversity."

Adam Mars-Jones in the Observer suggested the author's now familiar imaginary territory should be called "Trevorland", in the tradition of Greeneland. He especially admired "Trevor's handling of story endings... He doesn't go in for shocks, exactly, nor tailings away, more for soft rushes of feeling perfectly in the grain of what has gone before... he knows when to walk away."